[blusterXY]

If you're really curious what Inception is doing, you may enjoy this essay:

http://filmreadings.com/2015/12/31/a-skeleton-key-to-incepti...

Shortest explanation? The film combines Christian symbolism (Matthew 7:24), the Platonic theory of the soul (anamnesis), the Fisher King story from the Grail Legends, and the Greek legend of Theseus in the Labyrinth. The four parables intertwine effortlessly: Mal is simultaneously the Minotaur in the labyrinth, the Platonic negative (who falls into the world and forgets the truth she once knew), and the faithless temptress who chooses to build on sand.

The film then does to the audience what it shows the heist team doing to Fischer ("your mind is the scene of the crime"). So it is a meta-heist film that discusses how art communicates with its audience, all the while following the convention of the heist genre in showing us exactly what it is doing and then surprising us when it pulls it off.

[Hasknewbie]

Thanks, that's the kind of things I had not considered. It looks interesting, but I'll have to read it more thoroughly, as based on a first skimming I'm not entirely convinced by some of the views. For example, Fischer is not rekindled with his father; he is, if anything, cheated of this most sacred bond, and the way the author explains away that it is not so (because it would invalidate their theory) is not convincing. Likewise it is very odd that they present as a victory of sort the ending, where Cobb chooses the possible lie of being reunited with his kids based on his "faith", and ignores the evidence that his totem could provide him (and I understand that at a meta level he has previously rejected the "false faith" that was Mal, and his kids are supposed to stand in for "real faith", but the story is still the story and any meta analysis has to be consistent with it -- and here the story might in fact be telling us he is still choosing "believing" over "knowing"). If they're correct this vision of Fischer and of the ending, to me, would mean that the message of the movie is "choose faith: choose the lies you want to believe in!" which, somehow, I don't think is what the screenwriter had in mind.

I guess I'll have to re-watch that movie, then.